Public lecture: „Around and Around: Affective Masculinity in Circulation“ with Todd W. Reeser, University of Pittsburgh
Scholars in affect studies have argued that affect has the potential to do something to bodies and subjectivities and that that affect can queer normative bodies. Scholarly work taking this approach to masculinity and affect has tended to focus on how affect can queer, destabilize, or de-hegemonize normative men or masculinity, or normative interpersonal relations between men. Such transformations of masculinity may open up male bodies to gendered subjectivities not walled off or solidified.
This lecture will extend these theoretical approaches, considering how masculinity can put the queerness of affect into motion and help produce new gendered subjectivities in other types of non-normative bodies. In such a model, however, it is crucial to not hide or forget masculinity’s potential hegemony or violence, and the productive capacity of affective masculinity must be kept in dialogue with its potential problems.
Date, time and place: 10.05.22, 6-7:30 pm, Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstr. 116, 20249 Hamburg
The lecture is open to the public and will be held in English. Registration not required.
Todd W. Reeser is Professor of French and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Chairperson of the Department of French and Italian, and former Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). For spring 2022, he is an external fellow at the University of Strasbourg Institute of Advanced Study (USIAS).
His research lies at the intersection of French and gender/sexuality studies, with a focus on politics, identity, and cultural representation. He has published two books in early modern studies: Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In 2010, he published Masculinities in Theory (Blackwell), now a widely-cited monograph providing a series of theoretical models for considering masculinity studies from a literary/cultural perspective, especially as inflected by post-structuralist thought. His more recent work extends that project into the relation between affect studies and masculinity, and he is currently editing “The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect.” His book on French queer cinema today is forthcoming at Manchester University Press. He is currently working on a monograph “Transgender France: Universalism and Sexual Subjectivity,” studying how the inception and development of the category of transgender/transsexual in France starting in the 1950s relates to political ideas on the “universalist” citizen.
The research colloquium and public lecture are jointly organized by Prof. Dr. Andrea Frisch (HIAS Fellow and University of Maryland) and the Center for Gender & Diversity (ZGD)
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